


Everything We See or Seem

by Like_a_Hurricane



Series: Pernicious Prompting [16]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Extremis, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:49:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some mages have the ability to soul-see naturally, some must cultivate it; Loki was a case of the former, but generally scorned it for the discomfort of seeing more than he wanted when some people touched him. Possession of the ability, however, can become troublesome when it locks onto the one soul it determines to be matched to its wielder, particularly if the wielder is Loki of Asgard, and he finds his match in Tony Stark the moment he seizes the inventor by the throat. Then the floodgates open, and the nightmares begin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything We See or Seem

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for the following -
> 
> 1: "Would you consider a **dark Sleeping Beauty AU**? With the affected falling into longer and longer nightmares where effects (injuries, etc.) linger when awake?" -- Tumblr Anon
> 
> 2: " **Loki has the** [limited] **ability to look into other people's minds when he touches them** \- when he first touches Tony at the Tower, he finds out Tony's his soulmate. This throws his invasion plans way off- Loki wasn't planning for a soulmate- he didn't even think he had one" -- [misakikaito](http://misakikaito.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, [Soul-Mate AU]
> 
> 3: " **Loki losing his magic, violently if possible, and then trying to regain it.** Bonus points if they can't figure out how or why" -- [clareithromycin](http://clareithromycin.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr

Nightmares, Tony Stark was used to. He’d had more than his fair share since Afghanistan, and when he’d gone into the whole business with the tesseract, and gods from another planet and an alien invasion, he’d had a feeling that he might come out of it with a couple of new ones.

He hadn’t expected the first one to happen while he was awake, when the unfairly pretty but utterly psychotic Norse god of lies and mischief grabbed him by the throat. It had been loud, and sudden, and seemed to make time outside the experience itself slow down massively.

As soon as Loki had touched him, it had been like the completion of a circuit: something electric and alive that might threaten to send his body into shock. Then his head wasn’t his own anymore. He felt exposed, and bared his teeth accordingly––or tried to. His body wasn’t responding. Nothing outside his own head was. It had to be a dream, because hallucination just wouldn’t cover this complete loss of himself, his body, left only in the wreckage of––something.

 _No, not wreckage_. There was slick metal under his bloodied hands. He pulled himself up, felt eyes on him, as he summoned light from the dark. He was in a cave again. The light came from himself, from the arc reactor, with its faint and soothing hum. He strode out from the dark and into a place full of more light, gleaming metal, every plan, every machine, every lie, every manipulation and every manic plot he’d ever woven into being in the world outside his head: lies to his father, inventions brilliant and deadly, the deaths of millions all around the edges, not quite out of sight, but not front-and-center as people like Captain fucking America or certain members of the press corps seemed to think they should be, but that wasn’t practical.

Not if he still wanted to live, breath, function, survive, and keep this planet going.

Because he knew he was the only one who could build the future his father had only half-envisioned, half-hoped for. Tony could see it clearly: all that he knew could be achieved, that he felt his world, the world that made him and bled him and broke him down to let him know he was vital but he was far from untouchable––he had a vision of what he felt this world deserved from him, for all it had given him.

When he doubted, he sank neck-deep into images of blood and horror. That was all down in the caves, where he’d been taken apart before, and brought low.

Staring up, he saw something new detected, something in his head that shouldn’t be. He reached up, touched the screen, and saw through it.

And he fell.

He fell into someone else’s head, through his own skin.

Things went dark and painful for a long time, then, it felt like. Thousands of years of learning, fighting, manipulating, love and hate and pain and bliss. He saw through eyes not his own, a different sort of wreckage: a beautiful construct that Tony wanted to dig his hands into and study until he could fathom it, because it was brilliant and brash and dangerous––but something was wrong. Something at its core had shattered, and recently. It was a foundation-piece, a cornerstone, vital to the rest of the workings, and it had been twisted out of shape, ripped out. The rest was functioning, because it was all too brilliant, too clever to be stopped by one loose cog, but there was less efficiency, something too brittle-seeming in the way machinations moved, and the energy-flow from that core was much less elegant than it clearly _could_ be, and _had been_ , before... before something happened.

The rest was all sparks and Tony kept getting flashes of painful memories––Loki’s, he realized early on, but still couldn’t entirely fathom––whenever they landed on his skin in the dream.

A voice interrupted, shaking everything around him, vibrating through it, making it less real, less cohesive.

 _No_.

“What?” Tony spun around. He wasn’t done. He didn’t understand yet. He hadn’t figured out what happened here. He could smell blood, ozone, and burning. More sparks from all sides hit him, and he got a vision of a planet being blasted with something intense and brilliant and horrible. It _hurt_.

 _NO! This cannot––I will not let this happen! Not now!_ Loki’s voice.

Things began to fade. “I’m not done, you bastard!”

_Nor will you ever be. Not here. Not ever._

“Then why am I fucking here?!” the inventor snarled, gripping a nearby archway and clinging to it. “Tell me why you let me in!”

_I didn’t!_

Then blackness again, as the world wrenched itself away from him and sent him tumbling back to himself.

Then there came a crash of shattering glass and he was falling still, but differently. It all came rushing back––threatening Loki, Loki trying and failing at mind control, then that _you will all fall before me_ just before the crazy dream-like hallucinatory occurrence. And now he was falling down the side of Stark tower like an idiot who had just been defenestrated by an angry god.

Tony shook off the remaining disorientation just as the suit closed in around him, and with a rush of adrenaline and anger he pushed it aside in favor of making sure a mad god didn’t take over his world. He took to the sky, mussing the hair and outfits of a few pedestrians, and came to hover before Loki and that large broken window for a moment. Loki’s expression was masked with feigned confidence. How easily Tony could read the strain, signs of recent severe injury only half-recovered from over the past days trolling earth’s mightiest heroes, and other cracks around the edges, now more easily than he could before, the inventor wasn’t inclined to examine.

He got in a good hit for Phil, said something snarky, and then the war started.

It wasn’t, in retrospect, like he had a lot of time to really _process_.

 

~~

 

Liars’ magic is sympathetic magic, at its core. Twisting it to malicious use isn’t something many mages with a certain degree of natural empathy ever really manage. Most thought, early on, that Loki had empathy along with his other gifts, but it seemed limited to touch, and he saw and felt a bit more than mere emotion. With some, those particularly similar to him, he could touch them and see glimpses of their minds as though he were dream-walking while awake. Usually, that only happened once, and every time it cut off had come with a helpless feeling of loss, of disappointment.

Sigyn had been one of those.

His daughter, he could not see at all, nor she him. It had never bothered them; they knew and understood the turns of one another’s thoughts well enough to go without such aids of a more mystical nature.

He had asked Odin about this slightly strange gift once before, when he was very young, and been told that it was not unheard of.

“You are correct that it is not quite empathy, though you may find it useable in a similar way. It is old magic, older than Asgard. Few mages are born with it; most have to awaken it, or cultivate it.”

“But what _use_ is it? Aside from making me aware of the surface thoughts and some of the currents of emotion in people I touch, often whether I want to see or not. It has taken years for me to shut off this annoying power, father.”

“It will reveal friends, and enemies, and those with a soul compatible with your own,” Odin had said. “Some believe there is only one with whom they are perfectly matched, but most have many who match, or come close enough to allow them to live long, happy lives in one another’s company. I wed Frigga because she possessed your same abilities, and we came to know each other upon first meeting through them.”

Young and foolish, Loki had asked, “What happened?”

“Instead of losing connection as you describe, and as she told me had happened with every other, she saw more than she had ever before been allowed, and I too saw into her mind just the same. It is a rare thing, such a bond, but coveted and to be revered.” His smile had been fond and loving. “As I revere my wife, your mother.”

Now, in the present, beaten and chained up at the hands of his enemies, Loki began to believe that his life might truly be the universe’s most long, drawn out, and utterly humorless joke.

Because after over two thousand years of life, the end of his marriage to Sigyn, the closest he had ever found to such a love as his adoptive parents had described––yet still without that promised bridge between minds, without that almost obscene depth of understanding––and then the revelation that he was no blood kin to Odin or Frigga to begin with and how could he possibly be subject to the same rules as their bond, _after all of that,_ his mind had betrayed him and opened itself up for a mortal man’s perusal.

It had taken all of his strength to drop the connection before it sunk in claws too deep, and he’d felt sick ever since. Sick to his very blood and bones with resentment and self-revulsion. It kept tugging at his mind, at the marrow in his skeleton: a hungering urge to find the mortal Tony Stark and be finished with this, but the rest of him revolted, and he swore to himself silently that he would rather die.

If only his lies to himself were half as convincing as those he told the rest of the universe. And if only he didn’t burn with curiosity and desire for answers to thousands of questions that he’d told himself quietly for centuries, then ten times more loudly since that revelation-filled journey with Thor to Jotunnheim, were foolish optimism.

He was glad that the inventor seemed wise enough to keep his distance, until the day Loki was dragged back to Asgard, muzzled to still his tongue and prevent him casting spells. A mere glimpse of the mortal then, before he left the planet, had felt like his entire body were set aflame. It was with less reluctance than he would ever admit that Loki took hold of the other end of the Tesseract’s containment vessel, and twisted, banishing himself home.

The searing pain of distance had been unexpected and harrowing, however. He took the brunt of it, because he had been the one to do the breaking, and the forces behind it apparently knew where to aim that fury. He wondered, as it scorched up through his veins, whether the mortal on the other end would even get so much as a headache, but doubted it. His own magic was at the heart of this, and it was that unnatural twisting of spells he’d performed which now burned him.

Once in Asgard, he collapsed in a heap, half-deaf to Thor’s cries as his body curled in on itself and he struggled to breathe.

Distantly, he was aware of Frigga’s touch, her concern soothing briefly before the connection snapped shut unexpectedly. His system had rejected her, quite against his own will. It did not want her; it wanted Tony Stark, and oh was that demand getting adamant. Loki saw the dawning horror in his mother’s expression just before he lost consciousness altogether.

 

~~

 

“I have seen nothing like this before,” Frigga said. “It is as though the bond were interrupted, but that should not be possible. I cannot reach him, even in dreams.”

“He cannot stand trial like this,” Odin said slowly. “I shall inform the court that his health makes him unfit. They will fight against further postponement.”

“Is that your only concern?” his wife snapped, her eyes bright and fierce. “If so then perhaps we have lived so long that we have outgrown our bond, for I wed a king with far more heart than this.”

The All-father winced, his expression falling. “I only do not wish any to sentence him to death before he has any chance to speak in his own defense. Deservedly or no.”

Frigga stroked her son’s brow, trying to reach him where he lay hidden from her as he never had before, too far beneath his own skin for her to reach. “Your word is law in this world of ours, my love. You have weathered worse.” She looked to him. “Have you even tried to reach him? To let him know that you are here?” She glanced pointedly at where she touched him.

Odin moved closer, and rested his hand over hers, his fingers between hers where they rested upon Loki’s brow. “I believe that he knows. He would be too clever not to know.”

“You credit him with more knowledge of your care for him than he truly has. He is no optimist, our Loki.” She smiled thinly, with a touch of pain. “Not where men he has cared for are concerned, save for Thor. That was why he followed him so closely, even though it often pained him to receive so little in the end, after any venture Thor might undertake with him. He will believe now that you think the worst of him.” Her fingers applied a gentle squeeze to his, before pulling away.

As she left, she said, “I will persuade our people. I am the better for it, in these matters. They would not rob me of my son when we have only just found him again. They would not rob Thor of the only spark of true wisdom in his life that he can listen to when he is beyond your reach. It is not right of them to spare him given all the damage he has done, but I can make them do it nonetheless, and I will.” She shot her husband a warning look, then. “Take care to recall that you are not the sole regent in your house, my dear, and there is a place that he learned the tricks that he has used to fool even you, and that place was my side. Take care with him.”

Odin watched her leave, his fingers still on his son’s brow as he smiled faintly, helplessly to himself. “I have seen into her mind before, and I know the turns of her thoughts. They are still as familiar to me as the backs of her hands, which are more familiar to me than my own, for I pay them more attention.” He looked over his adoptive son with worry. “She still frightens and it sometimes surprises me, that she has not ever grown bored enough to try and usurp my throne. She is too wild for it, too apart from us. She sees more than I do, and I oversee all. She oversees myself, and all the rest, because she is my equal, if not my better.” He shook his head slowly. “And you have always been her son. I knew that from the moment I arrived home with you. She knew of you before I could say a word. To this day, I do not know if it was one of her visions, or if she simply claimed you the moment you entered her world out of some other sense of hers, some deeper instinct wiser than I have ever been.” He shook his head slowly. “After that, I could not send you to be king of another land, a mere pawn, and I knew it the moment she first held you, Loki. You became my son, because she was already yours, and my heart is forever with her. I realized my mistake.” His fingers trailed over Loki’s cold skin: Aesir mask gone, entire body at war with itself and all around it. In the very middle of his nightmares, the younger trickster was cold enough to damage their skin. For now, he was not quite so deadly, and Odin pressed a kiss to his brow. “Be not afraid to love, not now of all times. Please, Loki.”

 

~~

 

Tony couldn’t sleep soundly anymore.

In part, it was Pepper’s absence. Apparently, she drew the line at being romantically involved with anyone inclined to deliver nuclear weapons by hand, be it while saving the earth or no. She’d thought him dead until he called her, to be fair. Again. That conversation hadn’t gone well. Seeing her again afterward had only gone a little better because they’d had excellent I’m-glad-you’re-alive sex.

And also, about an hour later, break-up sex.

Tony spent three days drunk afterwards.

On the third day, he gave up when the dreams got too bad.

Initially, things had been comfortably nonsensical: being torn apart by giant blue ice-giants was distressing to endure, but faded fast and in a comfortingly dismissible manner upon his waking. It was when the dreams got a little more body-horror, along the lines of all the Avengers being killed and roasted by the giants, followed by Tony himself turning into one and being offered a massive slice of still-steaming, extra-rare Captain America steak, which smelled disconcertingly like bacon––that was where Tony started getting increasingly weirded out.

Then things died down a bit after another few days. He was dreaming about reading books and practicing lessons. Basically, he dreamed being a kid, learning magic. Obviously, no more watching Harry Potter movies while drunk, especially right before passing out. Problem solved. Right?

Until one practice session was in front of a mirror, and Tony realized with the disturbing clarity of dreams––as he felt the push and crackle of magic through him, the curl of chaos around the universe as it is, disrupting it with force of will just gently enough, just at the right angles, to get what he desired: a burst of green flame––that the kid he’d been dreaming about being, this whole time, was small with sleek dark hair and familiar, bright-green eyes. Young as it was, he knew that face.

For a moment, dual horror––his own and Loki’s––flashed across their reflection’s expression. Then the reflection, independent of Tony and the jaw that felt like his own in the dream, said very sharply, “ _Get out._ ”

And it had _shattered_ painfully––the mirror and the dream both. Tony felt disconcertingly like he was falling through a shower of glass again. He could see his reflection in the bigger shards while he fell, smaller ones making thin but deep scratches all along the skin of his arms, and a few cuts on his face.

When he snapped awake in a cold sweat, his heart thumping painfully in his chest, Tony seriously thought for a moment that he was going to die. His face felt cold and he reached up to touch it, to reassure himself that the dream hadn’t been real.

His fingers came away wet.

“JARVIS? Lights, 30%.”

The lights came up low enough not to blind him.

His fingers were smeared with blood, and so were his arms, from over a dozen superficial scratches that hadn’t been there before he’d slept.

“Ohhh shit.” Then his jaw tightened. “Loki, you are a crazy _fucker_ ”

 

~~

 

Loki snapped awake in Asgard, breathing heavily, forming a cloud of steam as he quickly, reflexively forced himself back to calm and as a result felt the disconcerting, still-novel sensation of his own body thawing from the inside out: blue fading to pale as he convinced himself that the danger had all passed.

He was alone, in an unwarded cell.

No chains.

 _Still dreaming._ He tried again.

Again he snapped awake, this time to the sound of clattering metal as he tried and failed to sit up. He tried to swear, and found his tongue stilled, which set him into fresh splinters of panic and forced calm until he got his breathing back under control.

And he could feel blood trickling down his face. He was bleeding. And his tongue was still: no dream. Not even in his worst nightmares was he entirely without words, without means to talk his way free. A world without words was not one he could truly imagine, even in dreams.

It helped, at times like this.

“ _Loki_.”

He knew that voice. _Frigga_. The remaining fight drained out of him all at once and he hung limp, eyes falling open to meet her gaze.

She leaned down and touched his muzzle. “I would remove this, but I would not have you make me regret it, my son.”

The trickster inclined his head in deference.

She removed the gag.

“Mother. What has happened?”

“You have been lost to us for days. What interrupted your bond?”

Loki swallowed thickly, and shook his head. “No bond.”

“Your wounds suggest otherwise.”

“What?”

Frigga’s pale hand reached out, and brushed along his cheek. She lifted her hand for him to see his own blood upon her fingers. “Do you see?”

“I wish that I did not,” Loki said. His eyes pressed shut and he he tried to reach out with just his breath: the part of himself unencumbered by any chains, which should be more than enough to free himself, but he could find nothing to grasp. He tried to feel for wards, for anything that might be stopping him, and felt... nothing. “Mother. Why is my magic so sluggish?” He sounded genuinely, albeit quietly, distressed.

Her eyes narrowed at him in a mixture of exasperation and concern. “Why were you reaching for it?”

“Oh, why do you think?” he hissed. “I need to sort this out, and I was really hoping to do so out of chains.”

She stared him down for a few long moments. “You have killed thousands, Loki.”

He stilled, and stared back at her, alarmed and genuinely worried. “I did.”  
“You know what your sentence would be.”

“Would?” he repeated.

“I am selfish. And so is your father.” She touched his less bloodied cheek, then. “And I have spoken to our people. They will none of them dare take you from me. Nor would Jotunns, for they know better than most Aesir not to underestimate any woman’s power, especially a queen, and particularly mother of the one who nearly destroyed their world. You would do well to consider too, that my love can forgive only so far.”

A loud click followed not long after the end of her sentence.

Slowly, Loki sat up, rubbing at his wrists and not meeting his mother’s gaze. He didn’t flee. He was still too weak to make it out if he had to fight, and Frigga would be happy to knock him unconscious without much effort, with his shields so sluggish to respond to his will. His usual teleportation spells, woven of breath alone at first, or from blood and breath both once his wrists were free, failed to initiate even as he focused on them––careful to keep his lips still and the voice of his breath too quiet to be heard by Frigga. But he could be free of those chains, at least, and see Frigga’s disapproval and concern both increase. That would do for now, though it tired him far too deeply, informing him that he was drained––very drained. “I expected less mercy than this.”

“Love makes us selfish. It is how much you are loved that you underestimate.”

Loki’s brow furrowed. “I was not wholly unaware, while dreaming. I could hear you, and I could hear Odin.” He met her gaze again. “I have not yet forgiven him. Nor you, either. You have broken me, by lying to me. My will depends upon knowing myself, and you let me build a false-self for _millennia_ , letting my expectations and my own natural abilities prevent me ever suspecting that my blood was the blood of _monsters_ all this time. You _broke_ that cornerstone, upon which my sense of self, and my willpower was built, and it could easily have been prevented by either of you. I _told_ my daughter _everything_ about her own expectations, compared to those of others, how not to be steered by them, how to know herself. Now I must tell her this ‘dark secret’ since it has been brought to light, and hope that she is stronger than I, as she so often is, just once more, and that it will not be half so damaging to her as it has been to me.”

Frigga’s expression collapsed. “And I am so sorry, for not trusting you, or myself, so far as this. It seemed so easy, and you yourself were nothing at all like––”

“Like. A. Monster?”

She shot him a glare. “Your abilities, and your expectations, did change you. Until one misplaced touch in battle chilled you enough to bring forth your more Jotunn aspects, until your expectations of what you felt that you should be could again overcome the defensive Jotunn features that your panic would have normally overtaken your form. Until then––until then, we thought you had changed yourself, out of belief, and that we could believe in that lie as you had, and have it become truth. I have wanted it to be true, and tried to make it so, that you are mine––my son, Loki. We believed that best, so that you wouldn’t leave us for another world if you felt you might better belong there. I was so afraid to lose you, even then.” She reached for one of his hands, and held it in both of hers. “We are to blame, for believing that it would be so easy as that, and for believing we might never need to tell you. For that unpardonable foolishness, I am sorry.”

Loki considered for a long moment, then rested his free hand over one of hers, squeezing gently. “I will need time, to forgive Odin, and to come to terms on other matters with Thor. You, mother, I could never give anything but forgiveness and love. We are alike, that way.” He smiled almost ruefully. “And we do both take advantage of it. Enjoy it while you can.”

She nodded, leaning in close until their foreheads touched. “I know.”

They remained still for a long moment, and tiredness tugged at Loki’s mind again: first gently, then very hard. “I’m falling.”

She touched his face. “Who is it? Who do we need to find for you?”

“No one,” Loki insisted. “I do not need anyone. I _can’t_ , and I _won’t_ need him.”

“Loki, please,” she whispered.

“If even you betray me, because of love for Odin, how can I trust myself to another? I cannot, mother, please,” Loki hissed. “I cannot. I have already gone mad too often, of recent, I cannot have found him now, I _cannot. I have too much blood on my hands, too much horror within me to give to anyone who might_ ––” He cut off, swaying for a moment. “No.” Then he collapsed as the void took him.

 

~~

 

Some long while later, the cacophonous, constant assault of memories alternately unreal and horrifically vivid, someone turned on a light, and things grew suddenly very clear and calm within that pool of faint blue light. There was a hum to it. Comforting, powerful, and all too intriguing.

Then it faded, and Loki heard the sound of footsteps near him. Even without the light, the clarity lingered.

“Ah, there’s the frequency. Somewhere between staight-up REM sleep, and theta-waves. Odd thing.” A flare: Tony lit a match, and with it, a convenient lantern. “So’s this for a meeting-place. I’d blame my own psyche, but I remember the explosive little vision-quest when you first stared into my brain and started this mess, and this cave looks frightfully similar to that, but with more from in your head laying around. And it doesn’t quite smell like desert, here,” Tony said.

Loki realized he was horizontal, as though he’d been dropped from the ceiling. He pushed himself upright and glared up at the mad mortal inventor. “What?”

“It’s been a bit over three weeks since the invasion, sweetheart, and I’ve had nothing but your memories in my dreams, and waking up all cut up or bruised when you realize it’s me, or something else goes awry in the dreams. They’re going awry more often, but you’re finding me less, and would you believe me if I said I’m almost worried?”

The trickster gave a rasping, wheeze of a laugh. “Smells like desert to me, but I just fell out of some of your memories, so that may be sand lingering in my nostrils there. You crash landed, in the first suit you built.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “I did, yeah. You only got that far?”

“It’s only chronological in the vaguest sense, most of the time.”

“Yeah, yeah I’d noticed a bit of that. I’ve gotten over a thousand years in with you, though, the very abridged version anyhow, it feels like. Makes me wonder if I’ve got the faster processor.”

“Adjusted, to keep us on par.”

“Why would that be? What is this?”  
This time, Loki laughed a little, pulling himself to his feet and stepping into the circle of lamp-light. He didn’t miss the way the mortal’s brow furrowed all the more, in a look almost like real concern. Loki had tried to shatter his way out of a few too many dreams lately. He hadn’t liked the effect they were having on him, the more that he saw of this mortal. He’d liked the injuries he received from fighting them almost even less. “You wouldn’t be inclined to believe me even if I told you, Tony.”

The inventor cocked his head a little. “Huh. Not ‘ye unworthy mortal’ not ‘you will all fall before me’ not even ‘insolent cockroach’ which, honestly, I bet my money on, at first. You actually know my actual, y’know, fucking name, and use it.” He rubbed at his chin. “And you look worse than I feel. Why––” he hesitated. “What am I missing about this that you’re fighting this damned hard against it? It makes me feel here like I should be too, but the more I do, the more I wake up hurting all the worse for it, and that’s not even getting me started on how this is making me think about––” He waved a hand vaguely. “Look. I don’t hate you.”

Loki’s eyebrows raised.

“Look, I offered you a drink, I even handled the banter pretty well, but usually, I stick to targeted questions and critical hits with most villains, alright? You’re already an outlier because even when I wanted to kill you for that shit on the helicarrier, I still didn’t hate you, I didn’t feel like the world would be better off once we got you out of the picture, which made no goddamn sense, but you had this fucking look, like––” He stopped, took a deep breath. “Well. We’re in a fuckin’ cave and you’ve seen my desert. I  know what I looked like right after all that, and you know what you looked like when you showed up here on earth via tesseract; I’ve seen that footage just in my spare time––at least, what was caught of it before the blast and all. Now, I haven’t gotten to that part of your life yet, and I’ve got some crazy enough shit going on in my own life when I’m awake with an old friend named Maya, and this fucking creep the Mandarin and I just––I need to have somewhere in my life that I’m not having goddamn nightmares everywhere I go. And if it’s the same for you, too, then we need to stop this, because I think it’s clear enough even before I start getting _those_ nightly visions that you’ve been through your own personal Afghanistan that you probably don’t want to relive anymore than I do. So how do we stop this?”

The trickster stared at him for a long, thoughtful moment. “You’re in danger?”

“Yes. It’s actually a pretty constant thing, with me. Surely, you’ve noticed.”

Loki nodded, saying nothing, though he began to look thoughtful. “We can’t stop it. Not truly. I have been trying.”

“What is this?”

That made the god of mischief flinch. “Nothing I need. Nothing you deserve.”

“Then it must be pretty fucking awful. Have you seen how much blood my history is fucking soaked in due to me being an ignorant jackass? I mean, seriously.”

“My mass-murder has been more recent, and less forgivable.”

Tony’s brow furrowed. “So, what? You-” He stopped. “Wait a second. You say that like you’re sparing me something.”

“Both of us, really.”

“What, exactly, are you sparing us?”

“Each other.” Loki squeezed his eyes shut for a moment against a sudden wave of dizziness that made him all the more aware of his injuries as it caused the pain to flare up more loudly, then he blinked them open again, and searched Tony’s gaze. “This is a bond. If it were up to me, I would cauterize this and move on before I destroy you, or lose what little of myself I have scraped back together to something so fatally optimistic as being bonded at the _soul_ to a mortal!”

“Best of luck destroying me, sweetheart. It’s not so easy as it sounds.”

“You’re _mortal_ , Tony Stark. All I need do is wait, and you will simply end,” Loki said, and something in his expression faltered, showing a flash of what wanted to be morbid amusement but failed, and in its wake flickered fear, and pain. “The universe has a severely twisted sense of humor beyond even my capacity to appreciate.”

“Look, I’m used to extremely pretty people around me speaking nonsense, but usually they’re either trying to make a scene, or get into my pants, and while I’m not exactly saying no to the latter, this whole thing would be going a bit overboard for that purpose, considering you could just escape your prison, get your happy ass down here, and ask me for fuck’s sake.”

After looking momentarily shocked, the trickster laughed despite himself at that, long and hard, disbelief ringing through it somewhat. “That is precisely what this is, actually, save that I’m no more hoping for it than you are.”

“Well, I dunno. Sex dreams would be way easier to cope with than the nightmares, really. Sooo much easier. Have you escaped yet, by the way?”

“My magic is fading, independent of the effects inflicted upon me in my incarceration to keep me here,” Loki said gravely. “That put quite a damper on all of my escape plans, or I would indeed be out by now. As it stands, I can no longer even bend something as cooperative as light to my will.” He said the last with less strength, his expression growing more distant, and yet closer to something like real fear. “I am very little without my magic, I feel.”

“Well, that’s a––wait, fading? As in, ‘not on lockdown’ and not ‘taken away to serve you right’ but actually, sort of...” He gestured vaguely, the furrows returned to his brow. “Well shit.”

“I can scarcely remember this past week, actually, beyond moments of but brief lucidity while dreaming,” Loki mused. He rubbed a hand over his face. “I only awoke twice. The rest, I’ve been lost in your dreams and my memories, or simply your memories while you are awake. It’s not meant to be this detailed, this drawn out. The distance must me warping it somehow.”

Tony leaned forward. “Holy shit. You’re really not okay.”

“No, Mr. Stark, I’m not.”

The inventor tisked. “I really do prefer just ‘Tony’ you know.”

“I do.” He was shaking a little, the dream losing cohesion around them.

“No! No, no, this is more progress than we’ve had in-” Tony reached out, then, and grabbed his wrist.

Loki sucked in a breath at the rush of warmth from it, eyes widening a moment.

The inventor, too, looked bemused and a little short of breath. “Uh. That’s, uh... well, we’re not in the cave, even. What did I just... where are we?”

“Quarters in Asgard which, until fairly recently, were mine,” the trickster said slowly, as though he were getting very suspicious of how conveniently clear and stable everything felt, with Tony touching him. “Let me go, Stark.”

“No,” Tony said, without the slightest hesitation.

“I said to let go.”

“I heard you.” He met the trickster’s stare. “I don’t want to.” He swallowed thickly. “I don’t think you really want me to, either.”

“You haven’t a clue what you’re saying.”

“A bond, you said.”

Loki glared at him. “Let go.”

“Make me.”

“I _can’t_ ,” the trickster hissed, through gritted teeth.

“Because you don’t want me to.”

“Because what I really want to do is strip you of your clothing and spend a few hours making you scream and finding out just how much pleasure your mortal body can withstand before you pass out. I want to take you apart and cause you to forget a great number of things, for a variety of selfish reasons, by this point. I’ve have already been drawn in further than I aught,” Loki said sharply. “If I allow you that close, however, the bond will only continue to solidify and I won’t have any chance at all to stop it.”

“Why stop it?”

“I thought that was obvious.”

“No, Loki, not when I think about it in the crazy terms you're vaguely laying out here and all the giant awkward parts of it you’re clearly trying to avoid. What sort of bond is this, and when do I get to finish taking apart what I got a glimpse of before, when you tried to stop it at the very beginning?”

The trickster hesitated visibly. “Pardon?”

“I saw the shape of... it was––something had broken. I could see it, but the structure itself was brilliant, and complicated, and I could have lost myself in it, and I keep getting the distinct feeling that all of that, all that I was seeing, was _just you_. And all this mess is, too, because you’re still running, still wounded and still fucking terrified and you have all this blood on your hands from stupid mistakes you try to laugh off and––god, do you have any idea how badly I want to just keep taking you apart and seeing how you work, you bastard? I keep seeing more of you, and I already couldn’t hate you, then I couldn’t _not_ like you, and if this keeps up, I’m going to fall in love with you while you’re killing yourself trying to reject a mere fucking mortal, you crazy asshole!”

Loki jerked back from him then, very sharply. The clarity and surety of their surroundings immediately began to loose cohesiveness, like candle wax being brought slowly closer and closer to a flame. “You don’t begin to know-”

“Then show me, you coward,” Tony snapped, stepping closer and grabbing him by the collar. “Show me just why I should run, because so far I just want to see more.”

“As you wish,” Loki snarled.

And things went dark.

Then they began to unfold.

And Tony was lost.

It _hurt._

 

~~

 

When he did finally wake up, Tony was not at all comforted by the sounds of a heart monitor and Dr. Bruce Banner reassuring Pepper over the phone nearby.

“Hang––hang on, I think he’s waking up. No, no, the company needs you out there while all of these rumors about his death are going around, you told me so yourself. I’ll call you back.” _Click_. Then the light on the outside of Tony’s eyelids dimmed a little: an observation lamp tilted away so it wasn’t right at his face. “Tony? Tony can you hear me?”

Eyes fluttering a little before he managed to get one open, Tony squinted up at the biochemist curiously. “Anyone get the number of that truck? What the fuck happened?”

“You’ve been in a coma for three days, Tony, and for no apparent reason I could discern. I found you hooked up to something you’d apparently put together to monitor and partially regulate your own brian-waves like the lunatic you apparently are, but that shouldn’t have kept you under, especially not after I removed it. So... Any ideas?”

The inventor rubbed his hands over his face. “Shit. What else?”

“News from Asgard yesterday. The bi-frost is repaired. Thor is visiting... older friends, first, but he sent word that he’d be here soon, and asked some odd questions.”

“Like?”

“If anyone had been having, ah, peculiar sleep disturbances.” He shot Tony a knowing look. “Much like the ones you’ve described to me, since the battle in New York. I didn’t tell him as much, but when I asked why he wanted to know, he got a bit vague, and said something about a possible affliction connected to Loki.”

“Affliction,” Tony mused. “Not a bad word for it.”

“Something you want to tell me?”

The inventor considered a number of myriad responses. “I think I found my soul-mate, Bruce.”

The doctor blinked. “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

“Ha! Well, phrasing, I guess I have been.”

“You... guess?” He raised an eyebrow. “Phrasing?”

“You got a phone number for Thor? Or his girlfri––er, ‘old friend’?”

“Yeah. You think he’s right about your symptoms?”  
“Yep. And I know exactly why he’s being vague. Get my phone, dial it, and hand it over.”

“Tell me why you were in a coma, first, if you’re suddenly so well-informed.”

“A magician never reveals his secrets?”

“Comas are not magic tricks.”

“Shush. This one sort of was, but I started it. Where’s my phone?”

“Tony-”

“JARVIS? Get me the phone numbers of the three people Thor is most likely to be within hearing distance of. Use the satellites, like I know you like.”

“Certainly, sir. Also, Maya Hansen called. Her stolen dose of Extremis has emerged from hiding and begun something of a rampage.”

“Shit. Start tracking the bastard and get me-”

Bruce reached out and flicked the inventor across the nose. Hard. “Hey!”

“OW! You fuckin’––who even _does_ that?”

“Answers, Tony!”

“It’s Loki’s fault, and I’m pissed, and I know how to fix this. Now sit back, relax and watch me own this. Jeez, Bruce, come on.”

The biochemist sighed a sigh of pure exasperation, and handed Tony his phone. “Start with the listing for Dr. Jane Foster.”

“Thanks, Brucie, you’re a doll.”

“Never, ever call me that.”

“Understood.” Tony’s fingers darted through the address list. He tapped Foster’s entry and held the phone to his ear. “Yeah, is Thor there? This is Tony Stark. Tell him I’ve been in a coma for three days.”

After nearly half a minute of awkward silence, Thor hesitantly answered, “Hello?”

“Your brother is an asshole, and I need to have words with him, at some point, but it’s not the only thing on my list right now, since I’m playing catch-up after being stuck in dream-land for a few days experiencing a great long _fall_. I know there’s also something about his life likely being imperiled if this keeps up, but since he’s the mage with the hyper-sensitivity to this sort of shit who started the whole mess it’s mostly on him, but if he goes, the chaos will come to me next, right? So he’s sort of the canary in the mine and that downhill slide is gonna be the same for me, but in a little more slow motion? Something like that? Yeah, let’s avoid that.”

A long pause followed.

“You really might be able to match him.”

Tony sighed, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I want to try, okay? Just––I really want to.”

“I will be there within a few hours, Tony Stark. And I thank you.”

“No thanks needed. I just need to kick your brother’s ass.”

“I have gift for you that may aid you in that endeavor, then. I will be with you soon.” _Click_.

 _Gift?_ Tony thought vaguely. “Crazy bastard.” He handed Bruce his cellphone back. “Absolutely insane. Thankfully. And optimistic.”

“You still don’t want to tell me what’s going on?”

Tony groaned, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes until he saw fireworks for a few moments. “I’m still trying to come to terms with it, so give me a bit. And a pair of pants. I just realized I’m in a hospital gown, which is really... wow, that’s drafty like-”

“Here. Pants. Put them on, please.”

“Thanks.”

“So. Asgard?”

Tony grinned. “Asgard. You in?”

Bruce considered, then smiled thinly. “Too many people in shiny, exceedingly smash-able armor. Best not to tempt the other guy, really. He already gets too much of a kick out of abusing Thor.”

“Right, right. And visiting Loki-”

“I don’t think that’s the variety of ‘smashing good time’ you’re after.”

“Point made.” Tony exhaled heavily, scratching his stomach. “I’ll brave it on my own then.”

“With Thor.”

Tony waved that off. “He doesn’t count. He’s one of them, and I’m not, unless he plans to offer me a-” He cut off suddenly, eyes going very wide. “Hoooly shit.”

“What?” Bruce asked, worried.

“I suddenly think I know what gift Thor has, and I now need a very stiff drink and a good long think about the prospect of a significantly lengthened lifespan. I’m going to go do that. Yes, bad idea, recent coma, but trust me, I need this, goodbye.”

Bruce actually wasn’t sure how Tony managed to both talk that fast, and reach the door with such impressive abruptness while managing to do so. He was impressed nevertheless, though. Then a horrible thought occurred to him and he made it to the door in time to shout down the hall, “TONY! TELL ME LOKI IS _NOT_ SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR SOUL-MATE IN THIS EQUATION, BECAUSE THAT IS NOT FUNNY!”

“I know it’s not,” Tony called back, sing-song, with a wave, before he vanished around a corner. Faintly, barely audible, was an added, “ _Much_.”

Somehow, Bruce wasn’t reassured.

 

~~

 

By the time Thor arrived, Tony was on his third glass of scotch, and feeling slowly more comfortable with the idea of what he was increasingly sure he’d somehow gotten himself into. When the thunder god held out a golden apple for him, he wasn’t even surprised. “I take it this has some finality.”

“And it will sober you.”

“Then sorry, but I’m not gonna bite into it immediately, I need to be a little less than sober right now.” Tony accepted the fruit, cupping it lightly in one palm as he finished his drink swiftly. “This is insane, I want you to know.”

“I would expect no less from my brother.”

“This bond...”

“Once it is allowed to complete, you will not be connected to him any further than you wish to be, insofar as any form of relationship.”

“Right. And if I’m not the one doing the rejecting here?”

Thor’s brow furrowed. “I do not understand.”

“He stopped it. Not me. Not anything else. He _threw me_ out, and then the war started within less than five minutes after it, Thor.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Rationally, I think he’s mostly afraid, but this isn’t exactly a purely rational event we’re dealing with here, and Loki’s only as rational as he is clear-headed and he’s not exactly been clear-headed much lately, trust me, I’ve been getting a look from the inside a few times a night until he notices me there and the shattering starts up again, which, by the way, _stings_ a lot.”

“He does not wish to be reliant upon another, nor does he wish to trust so far as may be required for you both to survive this,” Thor said slowly. “In part, I think he may believe that Odin would not accept you, as he has been disinclined to accept the way that I care for Jane. He also may be unwilling to risk being faced with the loss of this should he choose to embrace it and find it as invaluable as he knows that these bonds usually become.”

“So it’s a me being mortal thing?”

“And my brother being even more pessimistic than yourself.”

Tony laughed a little, at that, shaking his head slowly. “If it were really as simply as ‘finish the bond and part ways’ I don’t think we’d be in this mess.”

Thor cleared his throat. “You will have connection to him, at the soul. It need not result in permanent closeness of a physical or-”

“But it’s a vulnerability,” the inventor cut in. “The further apart we stay, the more vulnerable he’d be on a non-physical level to certain magics, and if I’m caught by somebody to be tortured or as a hostage, they could easily get to him through me if they’ve got any sufficiently wily magics. The reverse, in both cases, is also true for me. Our dreams will also likely have connection. There’s also awareness of heightened emotional states and extreme distress, I think, like a warning system when one of us fucks up too badly. We’re not getting out of this without some entanglement, and don’t try to tell me otherwise.”

The thunder god nodded, shooting him a curious look.

“I’ve been learning. Hard not to, with all the dreams.” For a long moment, he stared at the apple. “So this is from your dad, I’m guessing?”

“A gift of acceptance, and in the hopes that you and my brother both will survive this, and have something to live for, for a very long time.”

The inventor’s expression sobered a little. He considered trying to explain just what drew him in, with Loki, after all he’d seen, and that glimpse early on that still made his chest ache right behind the arc reactor when he thought about it. “I’d like to go into this clean, this... this whole ‘facing him down in a sort of definitive in-person way and finishing this’ thing. I want to do that, but I’ve got a war and a half on my doorstep right now. There’s an old friend of mine whose invention just got stolen, and the thief was spotted not long after I woke up. She called me not long after I called you, and the news isn’t good. I can’t leave just yet, but I want to.” He met Thor’s stare. “I need a day for this. Two, tops.”

“Is there any way that I may aid you?”

Tony took a deep breath, and let it out. “I’ll let you know. And I’ll be back for this.” He lifted the apple, then handed it back to Thor. “I promise you that. Just one more thing I have to do as a mortal, here, and I’ll be back for this... and for him.”

 

~~

 

Tony began to regret leaving the apple behind halfway through the fight with the Extremis-enhanced American-homegrown domestic terrorist, when he started collecting new and exciting little sources of internal bleeding.

By the time he was relying on local heat redistribution from a fire on the asphalt to get his suit enough power to lift an SUV off of himself and away from the fire in question, he was full of regret that he’d decided to do this while mortal. He had a chance to come out alive, of course, but it was slim. And he was way too far from Thor and Avengers tower for the apple to be it.

Once his foe left him to die, he arranged and air-lift to FuturePharm.

Maya looked rather distressed by the state he was in. Apparently, she was one of the many who’d presumed that despite confessing to be Iron Man, Tony Stark still put someone else’s ass in the suit fairly regularly for some of the dirty work.

“Seriously,” He said, his voice a bit raspy. “I am offended.” He covered his mouth as he tried and failed to stifle a cough. His hand came away bloody. “Dammit, if I die, Thor is gonna kill me.”

“What?” Maya’s brow furrowed. “Isn’t that... impossible, Tony?”

“Well, if he doesn’t, it’s been implied that his niece might make my afterlife miserable, and apparently she’s her father’s daughter, so that could still go pretty badly for me.” He coughed again.

“Tony, you need a hospital. We don’t have the facilities here to-”

“Maya, I’ve got more internal bleeding than a hospital can help. Extremis is my only shot to come out of this alive.”

Her face fell. “Tony...”

“You’ve got a dose left, don’t you.”

She nodded, looking pale.

“Get rid of the super-powers family-pack and lets get this show on the road, then. I need some new organs anyway, I mean, have you seen my liver?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Me neither, but I’m betting it’s not exactly pristine. Let’s get started.”

 

~~

 

He was in and out a bit, as he waited for her to return with Extremis, and took him a while to realize there was something deliberate behind it, tugging him down, trying to get his attention. He let himself fall into it, just briefly.

“I’m a bit busy here, trying not to die,” he said.

“I can tell,” Loki replied, standing very close, leaning over him.

Tony realized he was still laid out here, the way he was at FuturePharm. “You actually worried for me, sweetheart?”

The trickster swallowed tightly. “Yes.”

“Bit late for that, with all the pushing away you’ve done, really.”

“I don’t want you dead, Tony Stark.”

“Then stop dying.”

Loki hesitated. “I can’t.”

Tony looked at him a bit more shrewdly then. “You’ve stopped fighting.”

The trickster nodded.

“It hasn’t helped much.”  
Another, more reluctant nod.

“What’s preventing it?”

“Distance. Weakness, now that its been so long since this began. I could barely reach you for this.” He exhaled slowly. “As things are now, there is little or no way I might still stop this.”

“But there are still ways.”

The trickster gave a nod.

“You’re still considering them.”

“If you die soon, it would take us both.”

“That’s not really why you’re considering, though.”

“I am unwilling to possess this weakness.”

“I’m not as weak as you might think.”

“That in and of itself is almost the more frightening. Hope tends to be, when your own hopes have been too often shattered in the past.”

Tony nodded. “Thor showed up with a gift from on high you know.”

“What?”

“An apple, from Odin.”

Loki’s face fell open with shock for a moment. “I...”

“You really didn’t think they would, did you? Did you think they’d just let me die after a few decades or something?”

“I have had hope stolen from me before by my kin. I did not believe that they would welcome this, but I suppose they hope to see me anchored and care not what form that anchorage may take.”

“Well, they’re inclined to help me out, anyway. Probably thinking to avoid you or me trying to steal an apple later, I’m thinking.”

“Presuming you live long enough to appreciate it.”

Tony grinned crookedly. “Want to help me rewrite myself?”

Loki’s brow furrowed. “Explain.”

In brief, Tony explained Extremis. “I can rebuild me. I have the technology,” he concluded, at end.

“That would save you,” the trickster murmured. “But that is if you leave it alone, formula-wise, which you are not inclined to do.”

“I modify. It’s what I do.”

Loki took one of his hands, and leaned in until his forehead touched the mortal’s. “Then let us see, then.”

 

~~

 

When Maya came in, she thought Tony might have passed out, and called his name as she reached out to touch his shoulder, but he caught her wrist with his less-broken hand. “Oh.”

“I’m fine. Just daydreaming a bit,” the inventor lied. He could feel a buzz at the edge of his mind, and a sensation like being watched. It was oddly comforting, knowing Loki was there.

Even more surprising were the faint nudges from that quarter of his brain as he began to rewrite certain sections of Extremis: some long passages, some small, usually while he diverted Maya’s attention to other aspects of the whole mess. He took out most of the extra powers save upgrades to his own neural network necessary for the implementation of a few other parts of his plan, sped-up reflexes and response time, a bit of increased endurance at Loki’s prodding, and a few other small, key changes the trickster seemed to fixate on that Tony couldn’t entirely work out the purposes of.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re ready.”

Once he was injected with Extremis, everything went dark, as expected. His body seemed, for all intents and purposes, dead. He was offline. He didn’t even dream, for a long while, and when he did, there was something deeply disconcerting about it.

It took him far too long to realize it was Loki’s absence that had him so on-edge. Not only Loki’s presence, but his memories as the dreams deepened, were gone. It was only himself, now, an it terrified him more deeply than he might have expected.

Then he dreamed too long, and too painfully, about the cave. And about loss of something he hadn’t known until now just how much he wanted.

 

~~

 

When he did wake up, sloughing off an ugly cocoon with considerable disgust, he still couldn’t sense the trickster the way he could before the injection. It was worrying, but not enough to dissuade him from his purpose.

“I’m alive,” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Tony! Don’t try to move,” Maya said swiftly.

Sitting up, heedless of her instruction, he said, “I am so sick of people saying that to me. How long was I out?”

“Twenty-four hours. This is way too fast, it’s usually at seventy-two or more.”

“I made a few alterations to your program while you were out of the room. Removed some safeties, among other things.”

“You did **_what_**?”

“Turn it down; I think I’ve got new ear tissue.” He got to his feet. “Let’s see if the other stuff I grew works.” Silently, the way he’d learned vicariously through how it had felt reliving some of Loki’s early memories of learning to control his magic, he reached out. _Start_. Feeling a flare of something responsive across his skin along is forearm where his lock-chip was, Tony grinned, as a box on the other side of the room snapped open.

“Tony, what have you done?”

“All the components of my suit that used to need an under-sheath, all the messy little constructs so it could respond to my movements as I moved my muscles, are wired into my brain now. I just unlocked that with the chip in my arm, from over here.” He was grinning now, mad and brilliant. “Wanna see more?” he asked, as the newest model of the armor he’d designed, ahead of his own ability to pilot with his inability to get past the under-sheath and other relevant control-mechanism issues, began to emerge from the box seemingly of its own volition.

Maya’s eyes went very wide. “How are you doing this?”

“Vectored repulsor field: just lightly pushing things from different directions.” He pulled on his jeans where they were still folded on a nearby chair, along with his t-shirt, ignoring the bloodstains. Then he held out his arms and let his armor settle in around him, snapping effortlessly into place.

“My god,” Maya whispered, touching the chest-piece. “The stress on your internal organs––we’ll need to run some tests, to-”

“Grew new ones. I need to get to work now, Maya. Our bad guy, Mallen, is still out there.”

“We don’t know where he is.”

“I do. I can see through all Stark satellites now, and in any case, I know where he’s headed, Maya.”

 

~~

 

Some while later, after a lot of hijacked armor, far too many close calls to count, and now far too many people fallen out of Air Force One without anything even remotely resembling a parachute amongst the lot of them, Tony was feeling inclined to ignore his phone calls.

Except that he only knew one Dr. Jane Foster, and he doubted she was actually the one calling him, presently. So he picked up the phone, and a couple more bodies to attempt to rescue.

“Hey, Thor, I’m a little busy, Broski.”

“...Is ‘Broski’ another one of your pop-culture ‘pet-names’ as Banner calls them?”

“Maybe. A bit. More sort of a common term of endearment among the sort of... well, nevermind. Look, I’ve got another twelve hours, just trust me.”

“You sound winded, Stark.”

“Like I said. Busy. So unless you can haul ass from New York halfway to D.C. in under three minutes, I really have other things I need to be focused on right now.”

“I cannot. Perhaps in-”

“Time sensitive thing, gotta save lives. Later, Thor.”

 _Click_.

 

~~

 

Eleven hours and one fresh-rescued planet earth later, Tony returned to the tower looking more than a little haggard. He found the golden apple on the coffee table, near where Thor lay passed out on the couch in the living room. He released one gauntlet and picked up the fruit, examining it for just a moment before he took his first decisive bite.

All of his fatigue left him in a warm rush and he managed, just barely, not to moan at the taste and the relief of fading pain as his minor injuries began to heal. Aches left him. He took another bite, and another, until the whole of it was gone. Then he set the stem on the table and donned his gauntlet again. He stepped over to the god of thunder and prodded him sharply. “Hey. _Hey_.”

Thor startled awake and stared at him. “You returned.”

“I said I would.”

“I did wonder.”

“I really was busy saving the world, and all. Also finding incriminating, betrayal-riddled evidence against an old friend who asked me to help with this mess in the first place, and handing her over to the cops. That was fun. Oh, and preventing violent anarchic upheaval around the globe. Well, preventing some excessively anarchic upheaval and maintaining honestly a bit more status quo than I like, but it’s still better than that particular destruction-of-what-little-peace-we’ve-got-now alternative via the Mandarin, you know?”

The thunderer blinked at him. “I am willing to take your word for it.”

“And you’re the only one, you poor faithful thing. Get up, c’mon, let’s get out of here. Nowish, if we can.”

“You do not, perhaps, wish to change into––”

“Don’t even start. You and Pepper both, I fucking swear. Come on. Your people are effectively _vikings_ , and I’m fresh from a hard-won battle. I’m not changing armor, though believe it or not, I did put on a dress shirt under it at some point. I honestly don’t give enough flying fucks about formality to do more than that, and despite being knocked unconscious a few times for various reasons over the past 48 hours, I haven’t gotten a peep from your brother, and I think he fucked with something. Let’s go so I can strangle him accordingly.”

Thor was on his feet swiftly. “Yes. We should be able to leave from the roof.”

“No need to fly to New Mexico?”

Thor shot him a look.

“Joking, joking. Come on, roof access is... fuck it, let’s do this from the balcony.”

“That should do, but are you not forgetting something?”

“I ate the apple before I woke your sorry ass, now come on!”

The thunder god smirked faintly, and followed him out onto the edge of the balcony. “Heimdall! Open the bi-frost!”

Tony steeled himself for it. He really did. He was grim and his solemn expression could’ve been carved out of granite. Then he got beamed up, and at some point something like “WAAAAAAHAAAHAHAHAAAA” may have passed his lips, for which the inventor would forever maintain that he really could not be blamed.

Then they landed.

Tony didn’t stumble, but he swayed just a moment, or it felt like he did. And he seemed to be grinning from ear to ear. “I want one,” he said simply.

Heimdall immediately frowned at him.

Tony grinned back.

“Heimdall, this is Anthony Stark of Midgard.”

“I am aware of him,” the older god said, gold eyes burning like embers.

“Wow, you really go all out with the intimidating-and-all-knowing-dude-of-few-words thing, don’t you?” the inventor inquired.

“He is here to see Loki.  
The bi-frost’s guardian’s expression cracked only a little, in the form of a slight twitch just below his left cheekbone. “Of course he is.”

“Ooh, is that chagrin I hear?”

“Eons of exasperation,” Heimdall corrected.

“Close,” Tony muttered, as Thor grabbed his shoulder and began to drag him out. “Hey, hey, what––okaaay...” His eyes widened a little as he caught sight of the City of Asgard properly for the first time outside of Loki’s dreams. “Okay. Fine. Advanced fucking civilization. Congrats.”

“Think you can keep up with me in flight to Odin’s hall, Anthony?”

“Tony. Just Tony.” He grinned wide and toothy. “And of course I can. Lead on, L’Oreal Asgard, lead on.”

Thor whirled Mjolnir a few times and hurled himself into the sky with it.

Tony followed, close behind.

 

~~

 

Once within Odin’s Hall, Tony became aware of a lot of staring going on, and resisted the urge to grin, wave, and generally annoy people. He felt something not quite like nervousness, but it was still an uncomfortable itch under his skin, and it had only gotten worse the longer he’d gone without dreaming anything related to the bond, painfully or otherwise.

A guard met them soon after they arrived, and ignored Tony, which did not help him resist the urge to start acting like a genuine asshole––or otherwise more himself.

“Thor, your parents are within your brother’s cell. All is far from well, he is––increasingly injured.”

“That dick did something, I know it,” Tony snapped, and headed off in the direction of the prison block, far below Asgard’s weapon’s vault, and almost as well-guarded. He heard Thor struggle to keep up with him as he took unexpected turns, relying on vague trickster-memories from dreams that had gotten harder and harder to recall, but he clung to them, and wouldn’t let them entirely fade out. “I think he did something with Extremis, and I made the mistake of trusting him.”

“What?” Thor called, sounding worried and a little short of breath with it.

“Long story. He was helping me with something. Some of his alterations made sense, a few I couldn’t quite work out, but I was short on time and he’d finally fucking––” Tony cut himself off, taking a deep breath. “I should’ve worked out earlier he was still trying to fucking give up, but he still got it wrong.”

“What did he alter?”

“Me.” He didn’t bother with the stairs singularly, and when they hit a spiral staircase he just dropped down the middle of the long column, ignoring Thor’s sound of slight dismay in response. Tony still halted at the right floor, and flew the rest of the way through the halls despite Thor calling after him. He landed heavily outside the vault-like door of the most heavily-guarded section of the place. Logically, there were any number of cells that might just as easily hold the trickster, but they had all felt empty as he’d passed them. This one didn’t. And the fact a brace of guards stood outside it looking really nervous about his arrival was a bit of a clue. They looked flashy and obvious: not the real guards of the prison, but royal escort, because formalities were the sort of thing kingships thrived on. “I’m here for Loki.”

The guards looked like they might argue that, but a voice, feminine and sure, and sharply persuasive as a dagger at one’s throat, cut them off: “Let him in.”

Tony turned his attention toward the voice and recognized Frigga, standing off to the side of a doorway so well-concealed he hadn’t even been able to tell it was open until she stood half-in, half-out of it. He let his face-plate retract and braced his fist against his heart, bowing low. “I’d kneel, but time is short.”

“I’m not queen to you anymore than I fear I am to my youngest son, these days,” she said quietly. “Come in.”

Tony followed where she beckoned, trying and failing to keep his eye on the doorway as it slid shut behind them. “That is impressive.”

“Only that?”

“And I want a bi-frost. I may have to make myself one.” He shot her a look. They still stood in a foyer-like chamber outside the main cell of interest to them both. “Care to fill me in on what to expect here? I haven’t gotten an update in about two days.”

She nodded. “I do not know what he has done, save attempt to sever the bond in some manner more permanent than the last. Instead, he has trapped himself within some part of it beyond my reach.”

“Can I see him?”

“You will need to remove your armor. No weapons may pass the threshold.”

“I’m more of a weapon than my armor.” He tapped over the arc-reactor pointedly. “Think I’ll make it in?”

She smiled faintly. “It will allow souls, and what cannot be parted from them. Your mind and the rest of you, weapon-like as you may seem, will be allowed to pass.”

The inventor half-smirked a little despite himself, and his armor hissed, releasing and falling away slowly, until it again snapped together, folded together, into something that looked capable of fitting in the average over-sized briefcase. Tony dusted himself off casually, and rolled up his sleeves. “Good enough?”

Frigga nodded, looking him over in a shrewd, all-too-piercing manner. “I see, I think, some of how you might match him.” She saw his brow furrow and tilted her head. “You are less certain.”

“I can match anything he can come up with. I’m starting to think that’s not what he’s after, though.”

The goddess nodded. “He is uncertain, where he has little reason to be.”

“Well, you and Odin have this... similar thing?”

“Yes.”

“Ever wonder if he might like you enough to wonder if it’s manipulated your feelings toward dear old dad, who’s been a bit more treacherous for him?”

The goddess’ eyes narrowed. “That is not the case.”

“Does Loki know that?” Tony raised his eyebrows. “I can tell you I don’t. I’ve just been dreaming through a lot of it a bit too rapid-fire, and it’s faded a bit, but impressions do have a way of lingering, don’t they?”

“Then show him you are not manipulated by anything more than your own selfishness,” she countered.

The inventor considered. “Presuming I can reach him.” He picked up his phone, briefly, examining the results of the tests he and JARVIS had been running, trying to work out the purposes of the alterations Loki had made to Extremis, and Tony’s genome and all his fresh-regrown tissues with it. “Something is off, with my skin, and a couple of other things. Minor: within human norms even, mostly.” He frowned. “I’m going in.”

Frigga reached out and opened the door for him. Thankfully, she made no attempts to follow him.

“Keep Thor at bay?”

“Of course,” she concurred.

Then Tony was in a cold room with Odin, and Loki.

Odin, it was clear, was trying to heal injuries as they formed. Without looking up, he inquired, “Your heart: what nearly destroyed it?”

It took Tony a few seconds to realize his literal heart was the topic at hand. “Shrapnel, from one of my own weapons being thrown around by terrorists hired to kill me. Recently got that cleared up by rebuilding all of my tissues around my nervous system, all from scratch. Well... scab, rather. It was disgusting, actually.” Tony tapped his arc reactor with a satisfying clink-clink. “Kept some less organic bits, though: just improved the integration of them.”

Odin nodded, his eyes remaining closed as one hand hovered over Loki’s chest, and the other stayed in motion, always about four inches from actually touching the younger trickster, scanning for changes. “You were also poisoned.”

“Palladium. From an earlier version of the reactor core.”

“Ah. Tony Stark.”

Tony frowned a little. “You didn’t know?”

“No.” Still not looking at him, the old gallows god explained, “I have been busy of late trying to keep him alive.”

“I’d like to help, but I’d prefer a bit of one-on-one time here, if you don’t mind.”

“Normally, a mere touch from you would solve this, but Loki is nothing if not too clever for his own good. Perhaps had he not gotten closer and encouraged the bond in order to make his alterations upon you, it might have worked, but instead it backfired.” He shook his head. “If anyone could have escaped a natural, inexorable connection such as you both now share, it would be him, though why he would wish to do so, I cannot fathom.”

“Fear of being stuck with someone like you,” Tony said easily.

The All-father froze for a moment, still as a statue. “You are bold.”

“It’s part of my charm. Now please step away from my trickster, because I don’t think he’s yours anymore, and I’ve got a shot at bringing him back.”

“He is my son.”

“Not until you earn his trust again. You haven’t.”

Odin whirled on him. “And what is it that you believe yourself to know of this?”

Tony didn’t even flinch, though it took more effort than he’d admit to keep his face expressionless. “I believe you fucking lied to a mage for his entire life about what he was, and let him believe your lie because it would be _easier_ , and all the more excuse to forget you wanted him to be a weapon and a tool for you instead of a son to you as Thor was. You’ve always been afraid of him more than Thor, because Thor never had reason to hate you or doubt you until you let Loki fall, because you waited too long, drew out the lie like an amateur who doesn’t know when to let go of even the most cherished farce for the sake of preserving something more important.” He saw burning rage in the old god’s expression and adrenaline flushed through his system, every instinct in him screaming for flight, but his feet remained planted. “It’s not me you have your quarrels with. I’m just the messenger. Now please, let me see him.”

After a few long moments, the All-father took a half-step back. “I have never thought, since Loki reached adolescence, that I would meet someone even half so infuriatingly astute and reckless with words as he.” He shook his head, and headed for the door. “Go. He can survive perhaps thirty minutes unaided. I will return in twenty.”

Hearing the door snap shut, Tony swallowed and allowed himself a full-body shudder of sheer horror. “Jeezus fuck, your father is fucking terrifying.”

No response. Not surprising.

Tony stepped closer, then, to where Loki lay covered in a disconcertingly bloodied sheet. “What the fuck did you do, you jackass?” he deadpanned, reaching for the trickster’s hand first, fingers trailing over the back of it. _Cold_. So cold it actually stung, and Tony winced a little. “Jeez.” His brow furrowed, then, as he thought it over. “You know, I learned a few things.” He perched on the edge of the bed, leaned over the god of mischief. “Just small ones. Got easier after Extremis, and I think that was some slightly less dickish part of you. Like you knew even just feeling it through your memories to start, that I’d miss magic after a while and crave it the way you do, if only a little.” He reached out, focusing on _warmth_ and _calm_ as he rested his weight on one hand near Loki’s shoulder, and the other on the side of the trickster’s neck. It wasn’t too cold, then, and after a few seconds, it was barely cool. Within half a minute, Loki was looking thawed, and pale, and the dark circles around his eyes and the too-sharp bones of his face stood out all the clearer with the blue faded.

“Magic makes more sense than I really thought it would,” Tony said slowly. “The smaller stuff, anyhow. Some shit you pull...” He shook his head. “I’m not done with you. I want to know how everything works, and you know more than I do, and you’re insane, and gorgeous, and I kind of want to strangle you for making everything this difficult.” He swallowed thickly. “But hey, if––if you don’t want to stick around, that’s fine. I can figure this shit out on my own, too, given time. I’ve got plenty of that, now.” His throat constricted and he struggled in vain to find the words for the rest of it. Things as frightening as _I’d prefer to spend more of it with you, believe it or not, you little shit_. Affectionate things. Things that would get him hurt if he weren’t careful. If Loki would do this to himself on accident, Tony didn’t want to think about what the trickster would likely be willing to risk doing to the other half of this bond mishap.

“Hey.” Tony leaned in closer, until their lips almost touched. “Hey, princess.” He caught himself smirking a little. “You got most of the skin cells altered with whatever resistance you decided to add, but you’re underestimating a few things, and you missed the part where the tongue is a not only muscle with different cell structure, but if that weren’t enough it’s also chock full of nerves, and my nervous system is less altered than all the rest of me.” Still getting no response, he closed the narrow gap between them. Then, tilting Loki’s head just a little, presuming a lot and hoping not to get his tongue bitten off, his lips and tongue turned demanding enough to abruptly deepen the kiss.

_HOLY FUCKING SHIT._

And it was suddenly like he’d kissed an electric eel, but thankfully less slimy.

Then the initial, painful rough-edged buzz of shock gave way, and he fell.

Just as before, there was the same sensation of being isolated suddenly, and cut off from the rest of the physical world around them: time stopping, just for a while, just here between them. Tony fell into it, was flooded with it, found himself landing hard somewhere unforgiving.

Not his cave, he noted, and sighed heavily in relief. Then he sat up, and took in more of his surroundings, breath catching. “Fucking finally.” He reached out, touched one of the walls for a moment. The architecture wasn’t altogether unlike Asgard, in the hall he’d arrived in. Light fell strangely and the walls hummed with life, with thrumming power and magic and a purely _Loki_ sort of manic energy. “Now show me,” Tony whispered. “Show me everything.”

The walls moved, without moving, and so did Tony. He took all of it in, as it had done to him in dreams and out. It felt like years passing between breaths, as he moved through it, got to know the shapes of the thoughts that built it, knowing he couldn’t remember it all, couldn’t keep all of this so easily in view and in reach in his own memory where it would all become shadows and impressions as dreams are, once dawn hits. He had to wonder if Loki felt the same, looking through him. The thought stung more than he liked, and he fell sharply somewhere deep below the main foundation, somewhere far under, where there was something important-looking that had been shattered.

Tony traced his fingers over what looked like shattered glass at first, but on closer inspection resembled nothing else so much as the rainbow bridge he’d flown over, on his way into the city. Blood ran from the cracks in it, slowly, but still more than was healthy. There was another connection that had tried to bridge the gap, but it had been seared away, battered and torn. Tony went to touch it, and pulled his hand back sharply at the burning cold that stung before his skin so much as brushed it. Like dry ice.

Then he delicately pulled away the last remains of the less harmful shards, the rainbow-bridge-like connection, and set them aside. He reached out and pulled together a series of impressions the way he’d learned to do with dreams he wanted to preserve, but he reached for things he wasn’t personally guided toward. “So who are you?” he asked, and they came to his hand obediently: answers. “Are you no one at all?”

_Loki. Trickster. Giant-born, and giant-killer. Traitor. Liar. Chaotic and broken. Cleverer than you. Silver-tongue. Stubborn, prideful bastard, and don’t you forget it._

Tony smiled a little. “Is that all?”

_NO._

“Prove it.”

Memories welled up. _Father of Hel._ Pride, images of Helheim, and the goddess of the dead standing sentinel over flock after flock of souls entering her realm to dwell, and to drift down through time and judgements and old memories, until they might find their rest. _Favored of Death, destroyer of one world now, and many more in prophecies yet to be defied, though defiance is what I have instead of valor, for it has always suited me better._ A thousand tricks, a thousand manipulations, bitter laughter, the cacophony of the bi-frost striking Jotunnheim and the horror of thousands of deaths to be answered for. _What heart and soul I have is damaged, but they are mine, and I will always take more than I deserve for them, for I have within me more worth than good alone might account for._ A thousand thefts, a thousand stories, many near misses: rescues of Thor and others, of Asgard itself a few times, and spells cast that should have been impossible––magic to shake worlds and rattle the bones of mountains. _I am the God of mischief, chaos and lies. I am Loki, of Asgard, and I am my own._

The inventor felt the answers weave together, leaving his hand of their own accord and twisting together to bridge the gap, and staunch the flow of blood where there had been a wound before. The shards of rainbow bridge became caught up on them, arranged around them, fitted here and there, forming shapes like serpents all throughout: something far more interesting and strange than a straight and direct path.

“So that’s how that works,” Tony mused.

Then it began to fade around him, slow and natural this time, and he sighed. “Dammit, but there’s still more I wanted to-” He reached out, but his touch met empty air. The world was creeping in around him. He fell up, back through the dark and into waking, his eyes snapping open.

They were not still lip-locked. When that had happened, Tony wasn’t sure, but his hands hadn’t moved, and his face was only a few inches from the trickster’s, and Loki’s eyes were wide open. For a wild, disconcerting moment, the inventor’s stomach plummeted and he thought, _Shit, what did you see?!_

“You are a lunatic,” Loki rasped, but he already looked quite improved. His breathing no longer sounded wet with blood, as an added bonus.

“And you’re a fucking idiot,” Tony countered.

Slowly, with a mixture of relief, lingering terror, and disbelief, the trickster laughed, very softly. “Apparently so. I did not believe so at the time.”

“I don’t entirely blame you, all things considered, but come on. I’m not exactly the clingy type. I barely control my own life, did you really think I’d try and fuck up yours?”

“Well, you _are_ a part of why I’m currently imprisoned.”

“Yeah... about that.” Tony started to grin a bit. “Lost the cuffs, I see.”

“Early on. Not that I could get far, with my magic being drained.”

“Serves you right.”

“Perhaps,” Loki conceded, aloof as a feline again already.

“No gag, but I’m starting to consider.”

“There are far better ways to keep my tongue from forming words.”

Tony’s eyebrows raised.

“It would have been far, far easier if desiring you had not been a factor I had to cope with,” Loki deadpanned. “I was distrustful of it, given I distrusted the bond.”

“Do you still?”

“Yes.” His lips twitched. “But I trust you, to my considerable chagrin.”

“And that doesn’t feel right?”

“It shouldn’t. It does.”

“Yeah. Fucking insane.” Tony smiled wider and brighter than he had any right to, but he was just too relieved not to have been pushed away yet. He swallowed tightly, and rested his forehead against the trickster’s. “I’m a man of science. I propose an experiment. It’s a small subject pool, but I’m not exactly thinking of publishing this anywhere, so-”

“Tony.”

“Yeah?” He then jerked in surprise a bit when the god of lies grabbed him by the shirt collar and tugged him just so, allowing Loki’s mouth to catch his own. The kiss deepened quickly, full of heat and lust and something richer, deeper, slightly coppery with the lingering traces of blood on Loki’s lips. Tony melted into it and moved with it, teasing and parrying, unfaltering and wanting more. It occupied them both for a long while, until they were forced to part for air. Tony stared for a while as he panted a little. “So. Desire. Yes. Good.”

“Yes.” The trickster’s lips curved into a smirk. “Frightened yet?”

“Are you kidding? Afraid of what?”

Then Loki slid an arm around his waist. “Trusting me.”

“Why?”

Loki’s grin widened further still, showing all his teeth. Then he vanished.

Tony nearly fell off the edge of the bed, swearing a blue streak.

Odin strode in less than a minute later, took note of Tony looking flushed and enraged and off-kilter, as well as the fact his adopted son was clearly missing, and shook his head slowly. “I suppose I should not be surprised.”

“I’ll kill him,” Tony growled.

“Best of luck to you,” Odin said dryly, pulling the door open wider and gesturing for him to exit through it.

The inventor did so, and felt a strange shudder along his skin as he stepped over the threshold. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he paused, glanced over his shoulder warily for a long moment, and then tried, with frankly improbable success, not to grin like an idiot, as his fingers curled around the shape of something in his pocket that hadn’t been there before: something cool against his palm, with intricate carvings on each side. Instead, he managed a fairly believable snort and swore a bit more.

Frigga glanced at him once, smiled brightly for just a moment, and met her husband’s gaze with a masked, mildly questioning look.

Tony realized why it was Loki had gotten on with her so well, and casually began summoning his armor.

“He should not have been able to teleport from there,” Odin murmured. “The wards are not broken.”

“He must have found another way,” Frigga said.

“Mr. Stark.”

Encased in armor from the waist down already, Tony paused. “Yeah?”

“Did he give you anything? A small item, perhaps?”

Tony’s lips twitched, and he managed to turn the motion into a frown. “Not so’s you’d notice. Unless you count sexual frustration.”

Odin glared at him. “You truly have no shame, even by mortal standards.”

“It’s one of my many finer qualities, yes.” This time he grinned: just an aggressive show of teeth, with only the faintest touch of genuine humor. His armor closed around him the rest of the way. “Mind letting me out, then?”

Odin made no move to do so.

After rolling her eyes at him briefly, Frigga did.

Stepping out through the door, Tony bowed as he went. “Lovely to meet you both.  I’ll try not to actually kill him, but how bad would be returning him in more than one piece? Hmm?” The door began to shut. “Okay, forget I asked.”

Tony turned around and found himself staring right into Thor’s neck, which was far too close to his face. “Back up a bit, would you?” He pushed the god back a few inches. “See, now I can see your lovely... angry glowering face.”

“What happened?”

“He ditched. Vanished. Buggered off. Seriously, why didn’t anyone put the cuffs back on him?”

“My mother forbade it. What little magic he still had was keeping him alive as much as his own stubbornness,” Thor said.

Tony reminded himself to stay on Frigga’s good side, because clearly Odin was far from the only mastermind occupying a throne around Asgard. “Oh.”

“But my brother escaped?” And now Thor looked royally pissed again.

“Are you really surprised?”

The thunderer deflated from rage to exasperation in a single breath. “No.”

“Thought not.” He patted Thor’s bicep. “So... now what?”

“I believe that you would have originally been expected to stay for the duration of my brother’s trial...”

 _Lucky dodge there_ , Tony thought, grimacing a little.

“But as he has escaped-”

Suddenly the floor beneath them shuddered and the inventor felt an uncomfortable prickling all along his skin and up his spine. “We need to leave.”

“You felt that?” Thor’s eyes narrowed shrewdly.

“You’ve known me more than five minutes, and you know I spent over three weeks drowning in Loki’s memories while asleep, and you _didn’t_ expect me to learn a couple of magic tricks? Seriously, Thor, I’m offended. I’m also inclined to leave.” Another uncomfortable series of jolts, stronger this time. “They’re trying to track and trap Loki, I take it?” He started walking swiftly away.

“Yes, they are. Why are you-”

“Thor, stop and think for a second about just how good my humor is, right now.”

The thunderer stumbled for a moment. “We need to get out of here,” he said, in airy tones. “Yes, I recommend flight, actually. This way is quicker for that.” He grabbed the back of Tony’s suit and began to drag him.

“Thanks. You’re awfully understanding, I might add.”

“Tell my brother than he owes me a boon for once in his life.”

Knowing more about that than he’d ever anticipated before this whole mess, Tony grinned a bit. “Ooh, nice petty revenge.”

“Shut up, Tony Stark. See that light source, several stories up there.” He pointed.

“The architecture in here is just fabulous, I want to tell you. Seriously, this is-”

“Tony!”

“I go up very fast and break through the skylight, or is there another route?”

“Break. Then we head for the bi-frost. Make it appear as though I am chasing you, and allow me to tackle you toward the end, onto the bridge. Heimdall is more wary than he will admit of damage to the bridge these days, and he will not question as closely as he might have once.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Tony said, patting him on the arm. “Now try to keep up, will you?” He grinned his most grating shit-eating grin and took off at speed.

Thor laughed loud and booming, and took off like a shot after him.

Crashing through the skylight and into the fog above, Tony gave a wild whooping cry and shot toward the bi-frost, pulling out all the stops, dodging and weaving when Thor made a few attempts to catch him. He made sure it looked like the thunderer came close a few times, but Tony was playing with him, and the slowly increasing frustration and mad glee in Thor’s looks showed that he knew.

Tony spun to face him, almost a pirouette. “Come on, you can do better than-” And he set off the flaps, sending Thor shooting past him. “Hahaaa! I love doing that.”

 _Watch the sky, Tony_.

The inventor shook his head a bit, then stopped. “About time you piped up. Enjoying the show? I’m assuming you’ve got a way you’re keeping an eye out, despite being in my pocket.”

_I do. I recommend you fly lower, speeding along close to rooftops, but not spires._

“Lightning is just a pick-me-up, for the suit, you know.”  
_I do recall, but it’s not the lightning you need worry about. Look left._

Tony did. “That would be a funnel cloud. Big one. Yes, I see.” He cleared his throat. “Time to go.” He took off toward the bi-frost again, relying increasingly on digital input as he lost clear visual thanks to clouds, mist, fog, and occasional lightning flashes. “Think I irritated him?”

He could’ve sworn he heard Loki laugh at him, just before Thor hit him hard in the mid-back and sent them both careening down, down, at a sharp but perfectly calculated angle for Thor to land them, skidding, along the surface of the rainbow bridge, stopping a mere two yards from Heimdall’s feet.

“Do you yield?” Thor boomed.

“Do I get to leave if I say yes?” Tony all but snarled. “I’ve had enough of this!”

The thunder god rose to his feet and held out one hand. “I am sorry, Tony.”

Ignoring his hand, the inventor pulled himself upright, armor all but bristling, like the fur along a cat’s back when its hissing a warning. “Just get me out of here.”

“Heimdall?” Thor prompted softly.

The guardian nodded. “Get off my bridge.”

Behind his faceplate, Tony grinned. “Fine,” he said, sounding far more annoyed than he felt. He strode into the main chamber of the bi-frost. Thor followed. The ride back was almost as good the second time around, though this time the inventor was a little distracted by lust and smugness, and thus managed not to emit any wild cry or yawp of joy. He was just too busy smirking.

Then they landed, back on his balcony.

As his armor retreated, folding itself up near the door into the penthouse, Tony exhaled a long, slow breath. “How long ‘til they figure it out, do you think? Well. Everyone aside from your mother.”

“My mother knows?”

“Yep.”

“One day. If that.”

“Figures.” Tony slipped his hands into his pockets and pulled out the palm-sized charm, carved of ebony with willow woven through and fitted in. “Nice pocket dimension. I could use a couple of those.”

The charm fell through his hand to the floor and appeared to shatter into a column of smoke, from which Loki appeared. “They are ridiculously useful, I must admit.” He shot Thor a look, then, eyes narrowed. “A boon, then.”

The thunderer grinned. “Two.”

Loki considered. “Only if you leave. Now.”

“We will speak soon, you and I, brother,” Thor said, even as he spun Mjolnir, preparing to fly.

“We will,” the trickster agreed. “If you ever _go_ _away_ , for a start.”

“Best wishes to you both,” Thor mocked, and took flight.

Loki glared after him. “I really should have killed him.”

“Nah. I like him.”

“I question your tastes.”

“Well, I’m also ridiculously fond of you, so...”

“Fine. Not all of your tastes, but enough.” He turned at met Tony’s gaze only a little warily. “You mentioned an experiment, I believe.

Grinning, Tony grabbed the shiny gold collar of Loki’s chest-plate and tugged at it, trying to pull him in closer. “Why are you dressed in armor right now?”

“Lack of other garb.”

“Better question: why are you dressed at all?”

Lips curving into a smirk, Loki purred, “Far better question.” He sidled closer, until he had Tony trapped between himself and the railing of the balcony. “And I can think of no reason for either of us to be wearing so much as a scrap of clothing just now.”

Tony gripped the trickster’s hips and pushed him back bodily. “Last time you were out here, you _broke_ my balcony. Indoors, for you, I think.”

“Thor broke it.”

“You broke, with Thor, after you flung him.”

“Details,” Loki muttered dismissively, capturing his mouth again.

Tony lost track of his steer-the-trickster-toward-a-suitable-horizontal-surface plan for a few moments, stilling with one foot still on the threshold, until Loki pulled him further in and shut the door with a vague hand-wave. When they both grew clearly too distracted with each other to keep walking, the trickster lost patience and teleported them into Tony’s bedroom, losing most of his armor along the way, which the inventor was more than happy with.

“You’re unfairly gorgeous,” Tony breathed against the trickster’s throat, his hands trapped in Loki’s last remaining article of clothing: under the waistband of the trickster’s leather trousers, fingers gripping hard at Loki’s buttocks. “Just indecent.”

“I have not yet begun to show off my indecency,” Loki purred, grinding his hips down against the inventor’s and grinning at the breathless noise it earned him. “I might start between your legs, I think, with my mouth, and then proceed to fucking you senseless.”

Tony made an inarticulate noise. “That’s a good plan. I like this plan.”

“Good.” Loki caught his mouth again, and pushed him down against the cool sheets: all long limbs and lean muscle and that impossibly perfect, maddening mouth driving him to desperation Tony was happy to give over to. This was what he needed, down to his bones: heat and desire to warm him, bring him back down to earth and let him drag Loki with him, to be base and hungry and desperate with him.

To know it wasn’t just him, full of so much want it _hurt_. For this.

To _have_ this.

“When did––fuck, don’t stop that.”

“What, this?”

Tony groaned. “No, but that’s good too. Damn, it’s been too long since–– _oh holy fuck haaahh_.” There was wetness and heat and that tongue was pressing into him slick and hot, and it was just unholy good, and wrong and _perfect_ _right there yes that._ Then it stopped and Tony might have whimpered.

“You were asking a question, I believe?”

“I was?”

“I believe so.”

“I think I was asking when exactly you––gghhfuck that’s distracting.” The two long fingers that had pushed into him now curled, dragging hard and sweet back over that same _eminently distracting_ spot. “When. You. Started. Wanting. This?”

Impressed that the inventor had managed words, Loki considered. “I first considered that fucking you might be satisfying when you had the gall to threaten me.”

Tony smiled despite himself. “Somehow, I had a feeling, but I meant–ksssshhhit, that’s good, _ah_!”

“I know what you meant,” Loki assured, smirking a little as he let his lips brush the side of Tony’s cock, enjoying the way the inventor’s hips twitched involuntarily at the touch. “I truly desired you like this, to a degree that I found disconcerting, when you were so disinclined to leave my mind, but I pushed that aside rather desperately, given the initial panic of losing control shortly before starting a war, and all the rest.” He licked then, slowly up from base to tip, swirling his tongue there.

The inventor ground his hips down harder against Loki’s hand in response, murmuring a low string of curses. “You do seem to have a habit of sticking to bad decisions you make when panicking,” he managed to grit out.

“Very true. I suffered enough at my own hands for that of recent, however, and have no hopes of any further repetitions, if they can be at all helped.” He settled lower between the mortal’s legs, nuzzled at one inner thigh. “Remember when I stated that I could barely remember a week’s passing, when you interrupted the dreaming?”

“Yeah?” Tony’s voice was a bit breathless.

“It was half-lie. It felt longer, until you interrupted, which by rights you should not have been able to do. I had already become grudgingly fond of you, but that rather cinched the desire aspect. I was _impressed_ deeply.”

“Because I paused the dream-land merry-go-round?”

Loki hummed. “Idiom?”

“Maybe? It’s really hard to pay attention to linguistics when you’re fingering me so fucking well, seriously, you’re lucky I can form words.”

The trickster smirked. “Yes, let’s put a stop to that, hm?” Then he licked the head of Tony’s cock again, which was all the warning the inventor got before Loki swallowed him whole. Words were, indeed, not happening; however, he might have emitted a guttural moan as Loki’s tongue proved once more insanely talented. Subject to such ministrations, Tony remained utterly inchoate for several long minutes until desperation clawed at him. “You keep this up and I’m going to come in your mouth,” he managed.

Loki met his gaze wickedly and bobbed back down, humming low in his throat fit to make the mad inventor’s eyes roll back in his head.

He didn’t last long before he fell apart, shaking a little as Loki swallowed, and gently released him, crawling up his body. “Your fucking mouth,” Tony said, and couldn’t come up with any further words.

“Now, given you’ve forsaken mortality, allow me to introduce you to your own improved recovery time,” Loki purred, fingers stroking where his mouth had been.

The inventor hissed long and low, trailing off as near-painful sensitivity gave way slowly to renewed arousal. _No wonder there’s so much sex in all the myths, holy shit._ “You’re going to ruin me aren’t you?”

“Complaints?”

Tony settled his legs about the trickster’s waist. “None yet, so don’t stop now.”

Loki caught his mouth again to silence him.

 

~~

 

It was almost a full two days before any of the Avengers saw Tony Stark again.

After the third attempt by their resident spies to get any access to the inventor’s penthouse resulted in Hawkeye finding himself suddenly upside-down, dangling by a rope around his ankles anchored somewhere on the ceiling he couldn’t discern, with all of his clothing dyed pink, they gave up trying to invade his privacy. (The prior two attempts had seen Natasha wrapped in three different colors of duct tape applied by mechanical means apparently borrowed from their combat practice rooms, and Clint spending a full hour convinced that he was covered in bees possibly due to application of a mild hallucinogen.)

“How is he doing this shit?” the archer complained, as he cut himself down.

“I’m starting to wonder if it’s not him at all,” Bruce mused. “You were literally not there, and then a second later, poof.”

“‘Poof?’ Seriously?”

“I’m perfectly serious. This reeks of magic, to me.”

“Tony Stark meddling with magic. Yeah, that’s it, I’m out.”

Bruce, meanwhile, sent the inventor a text. _Please, please tell me that the methods by which Clint became a ceiling-based decor feature have a perfectly sound scientific explanation that doesn’t involve Asgardian magics of any kind._

He only had to wait a minute or so for a response. _So you want me to lie to you just to make you feel better? Does that sound like a ME thing to do?_

The biochemist grimaced. _He’s not in prison anymore, then?_

_Nope. Unless you could call my bed a prison, but he’s not really restricted to just there, so really..._

_Thank you for not actually finishing that sentence_.

_That was because I, uh, got distracted, actually. Extremis alterations have made texting mostly hands-free, but he can tell when I’m not focused and-_

The fact it cut off there made Bruce uneasy. _I don’t want to know._

_Accurate. You don’t._

_Keep him out of the lab._

_Bit late. Got a lot of useful data on various magics now, and learned a few tricks. Actually, innuendo aside, that’s what we’re up to at the moment._

Clint managed to get himself down, landing on his feet almost gracefully. “I need a drink,” he said, and left.

Bruce watched him go, and headed for Tony’s private lab.

It was, not surprisingly, on Stark-only lockdown. Bruce knocked. _If you’re not actually having sex in there, share the scientific knowledge or I’m telling the others._

The door hissed open, and through the crack, the biochemist could hear Tony still laughing. “I knew there was a reason I like you, Bruce.”

He stepped in warily, noting how equally uneasy Loki looked, but that might have been more to do with his last interactions with the Other Guy than anything else. “What the hell are you two doing with a particle-collider?” A pause. “When did we get a particle-collider that can somehow fit in this tower?”

“I’d been working on it for a week or so before all the Mandarin stuff started, but we finished it up late last night. Want to see something cool?” Tony was grinning and wagging his eyebrows.

“Nothing that’s going to explode or open any strange portals?” Bruce inquired, shooting the trickster god a disbelieving look.

“Not this time.” Loki, for his part, appeared a bit smug, but there was mischievous curiosity in his expression, too. “I was aware that Midgard’s advances in understanding of the universe have advanced impressively far over the past few centuries, but until recently I was not so acutely aware of in what different directions it has grown, as compared to my own understanding.”

“Magic-based you mean?” Bruce suggested.

The trickster nodded once. “The differences between science and magic are akin to those between madness and genius: slippery at best, and uncomfortably contradictory at worst. We’ve bridged one of the gaps here, however, on a particulate level, in isolating the effects of will to move things against what seems their more natural tendencies.”

“Should we show him, dear?” Tony mused.

Examining the increasingly rapt curiosity in Dr. Banner’s expression, Loki’s shoulders relaxed a little. A scholar, and a man inclined to pry deeper and deeper into the universe’s workings, was the sort of creature Loki could handle, and such absorbed fascination would likely keep the man’s more bestial, baser nature at bay. It put him a bit more at his ease. “I don’t see why not.” He grinned fiercely at his mad inventor. “Fire her up.”

Tony grinned back and waved a hand vaguely at the controls several feet away, causing them to coalesce into activity seemingly of their own accord.

“Uh... Tony?” Bruce asked.

“That was just me. Remember? I know I explained the Extremis thing before I went to Asgard and all.”

“You actually went?”

Loki and the inventor exchanged an amused glance. “Yeah. I did.”

“Consider me a souvenir,” the trickster added.

“That would imply I’d get to keep you around for memories’ sake.”

“I should hope it would be for the sake of many other things as well, but that aside, the other half of your posited implications is indeed true, insofar as either of us can be considered keepable, given how we are never still and in the same place for terribly long,” Loki responded, with a seemingly casual air.

The way the inventor did a slight double-take belied that apparent flippancy, though. As did the look on Tony’s face as he opened his mouth to speak and words failed to form. Finally, he managed, “Good.”

The trickster smirked at him with genuine heat that went far deeper than lust.

Tony returned it.

Bruce quietly cleared his throat.

The pair turned their attention to him with near-identical looks of mild inquiry, as though neither of them could fathom the source of his discomfiture.

“Okay, that’s creepy. What are you both out to show me with the collider, and what particle or particles are going through it right now?”

“Oh, the trick’s already started,” Tony said simply. “Take a look at the results over there on the screen.” He jerked his chin toward a display on the end of a movable, adjustable arm, which extended toward Bruce.

Taking a good long look at at, the biochemist’s eyes widened. “Explain this.”

“Manipulating light is one of the easiest tricks one can learn, as a mage: guiding it, fooling it, shaping its path,” Loki explained. “We don’t really consider it altogether in terms of particles, and the way magic manipulates certain wave-forms is–– _complex_. Especially when it comes to the alteration of behavior of matters other than light.”

“It only took us a few hours to get a few Higgs Bosons,” Tony added with a grin.

Bruce began to grin despite himself. “You have my attention.”

 

~~

 

The next morning, Tony actually made an appearance at breakfast and was met with taunting and mostly-harmless projectiles by the rest of the Avengers.

“Hey! OW! Clint, dammit, no cutlery!”

“You blocked it!”

“Good thing, too, because you aimed it at my _eye_!”

“I heard you grew new ones, along with everything else, and I may have wanted to see if you could do that on command,” the archer responded. “How’d you hang me from the ceiling like that? Bruce thought you were dicking around with magic.”

“And he was dicking around with me. Thoroughly, in both cases, on a variety of different surfaces vertical and horizontal alike,” Tony responded lightly, grinning at the disgusted look Clint shot him in response.

“You owe me twenty bucks, Clint,” Natasha mused.

“Dare I ask?” Tony sighed.

“He bet on Amora or someone otherwise female,” the spy explained.

The inventor made a face. “Nooo way. Amora has a habit of inspiring a sort of mistress-slave relationship in a not-just-playing sort of sense that just doesn’t appeal to me. Not my thing. What was your bet?”

“Loki, given Thor’s recent visit was so swiftly followed by you disappearing right after that _huge_ mess with the Mandarin and Extremis. Your usual post-catastrophe press conference was, mmm, unusually brief,” Natasha offered.

“Good one you. Pay the lady, Barton.”

The archer choked on a bite of bacon, and continued to until the redheaded assassin hit him once, very hard, in the mid-back. “Please tell me you’re joking,” he rasped, looking alarmed even as the redness left his face.

“I agree,” Steve said faintly, looking distinctly lost, confused and disturbed.

“I’m never joking,” Tony deadpanned.

“Liar,” Bruce muttered, picking at his eggs.

“How are you not disturbed by this?” Clint groaned.

“I already worked it out, honestly,” Bruce countered. “I think there’s a long story involved, related to Tony’s frequent sleep disturbances since the battle over New York. My guess is some sort of dream-connection, given Thor warned us a bit about Loki having a knack for that and being destructive when bored or in need of distraction, one or the other seeming fairly likely given he was going to be incarcerated and all.”

“How long _have_ you been screwing him? And in dreams? Really?” The archer dropped his fork loudly on the table. “Stark, you’re a lunatic and a slut.”

“Accurate on both counts a bit, but to be fair, we didn’t quite get around to that until he got out of his cell in Asgard and everything,” Tony corrected. “That wasn’t dream-land. Not much sleeping involved at all, really.”

“Tony,” Steve said quietly. “Why?”

“Oh. Apparently he’s... I’m...” He gestured vaguely. “It’s really complicated?”

“Complicated?” Natasha’s eyebrows were raised now. “Holy shit, guys, this is actually serious.”

The inventor began to look extremely uncomfortable. “Uhm. Yes. That.”

Clint was, apparently, beyond words. His mouth hung open, lips occasionally twitching with wordless, silent horror.

“I guess I should go over that a bit. He’s still not a good guy, but to be fair, I hardly qualify either, so––”

“He’s committed a bit more murder than you,” Natasha pointed out.

“Well, he’s from Asgard,” Tony said. “Seriously, they all have these disconcerting kill counts if they’ve ever ‘gone adventuring’ with Thor and Loki, or the Warriors Three, or Sif, or any number of the other crazy warrior vikings up there. It’s a thing they do: go on an adventure somewhere, get in trouble, kill a few sentient beings who try to prevent their escape, and then get home mostly intact. That’s how they wile away the centuries or whatever.” He waved a hand. “Loki did actually commit an act of genocide as well, and that’s something I’m still coming to terms with a bit, but much of the rest of the deaths he’s been responsible for are about on par in number and directness-of-responsibility-pinning as all the blood I’ve got on my hands from being an iron-monger and war profiteer for most of my life, shamelessly glorying in violence and imperialism all over the globe, and having a lot of fun with it. I think as far as horrible acts committed, my only real disadvantage is time-scale.” He poured himself a cup of coffee in the long, awkward silence that followed, and downed most of it in one gulp. As the silence stretched further, he decided to take advantage of it and added, “Oh, and it turns out there’s a complicated mage-related thing that almost got him and I both killed because when he grabbed me by the throat to throw me out the window it kicked in a link between my mind and his because apparently our souls were so compatible they intended to form a deep and profound bond. Loki kind of broke it a bit, by putting a violent but not-as-complete-as-he’d-have-liked stop to it, which has been causing me some problems while keeping him in a nightmare-riddled coma 90% of the time since we shipped him off home, that didn’t stop until I got there and we let the process complete. Like I said: it’s really, really complicated.” He finished the mug of coffee, and then refilled it. It was gonna be that sort of day.

“Wait––what?” Steve all but squawked.

Natasha opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Then she tried again, with a little more success: “I think he just said he and Loki are soul-mates?”

Tony frowned a little. “That sounds so un-scientific.”

“You have a scientific version?” Bruce asked.

The inventor considered. “Nnnot yet, but I’m working on it.”

“But the bond thing wasn’t––intentional?” Steve asked.

“Not at all,” Tony confirmed solidly. “Loki originally was having none of it, and I was curious, but not exactly liking the invasion of head-privacy and the intense... _feelings things_.” He shuddered a little. “Saw a lot of the inside of his head, too, though.”

“This is not getting less disturbing, please, Nat, make it stop,” the archer whimpered softly.

“Shhh, it’s getting good,” she snapped.

The inventor frowned at them. “Hey. It was a pain in the ass.”

“Use more lubrication next time,” Nat riposted.

Clint made a strangled noise. Steve was suddenly very, very pale.

“Not that part. That was actually... mmm... very fine.”

“No details, for the love of God,” the super-soldier groaned.

Tony was staring into space thoughtfully, sipping at his coffee.

It took them all a few moments to realize he was genuinely off in the land of being distracted and remembering a good bit of shagging.

“Tony!” Natasha shouted.

He looked at her and offered a benign smile. “Sorry, what was I saying?”

“That you’re bonded on a soul-deep level with the god of lies and mischief,” Bruce supplied.

“Right. Mostly. Well, the whole ‘need to be close and share this thing’ bit is done, and there’s a link, yeah, but uh, it’s not exactly mandatory. It’s a vulnerability, really, for certain sorts of attacks from enemies of the sort Loki’s collected over time, with powers a bit like his, because of the connection, but that’s it. The rest is very consensual. The sex was even optional, and I opted in on that first chance, because really, have you _seen_ him?”

The others were all looking increasingly disgruntled and exasperated by then.

“So you are or aren’t going steady?” Bruce asked, for clarification.

“He’s mine, yeah. I’m following this experiment to the bitter end, and I’d like you all to be aware that if you try to change my mind or otherwise muck about with that whole plan, then you really won’t like the results. Fair warning,” Tony offered. “You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it, or trust him, or any of that, but keep in mind that I’m very possessive when it comes to what’s mine. We clear?”

The other Avengers exchanged glances for a few moments.

“Clear to me,” Bruce said. “Don’t die.”

“Already got a boost there, recently. Oh, also guys, I’m a god now even more so than I was before. They take this soul-bond stuff kinda seriously in Asgard and I guess they think losing this might have a really bad effect on Loki in the long-run, in ways they don’t want to find out about if it can be at all avoided.” He raised his half-empty mug toward them all. “Cheers. The rest of you? Comments? Questions? Insults?”

“You’re insane,” Clint sighed, muffled a bit because he had his face in his hands.

“Well, yeah.” Tony shrugged. “And?”

The archer lifted his head. “And the series of train-wrecks I foresee heading your way because of this shit had better be seriously amusing enough to be worth all the therapy I’m going to need after this.”

“Do you know a good therapist for this sort of thing?” Steve asked lightly.

“I’ll get you her card,” Clint said softly.

“Your thoughts, Cap’n Crunch?” Tony prompted.

“I think this is a terrible idea,” the super-soldier said slowly, “but I can’t really argue with a gods-sanctioned soul... thing. Apparently, higher powers are at work that I don’t know if I want to understand.”

“I’ll take it.” The inventor gave a thoughtful nod. “Natasha?”

“If he hurts any of mine again, I’ll skin him alive. Same for you,” she said, and then shrugged. “Other than that, have fun and keep the explosions to a minimum when I’m trying to sleep, if at all possible.”

“Thanks,” Tony said, with a hint of a grin.

“You’re welcome.”

“What does, ah, Thor think of this?” Steve asked.

“He gave me the golden apple of eternal youth and godliness, and Loki owes him an impressive little debt,” Tony answered. “He’s amused as shit, I think.”

The super-soldier nodded slowly, still looking uneasy. “I still don’t entirely understand––I thought you were, uh... that you like women?”

“I do. Also pretty men,” Tony said. “You’ve got a nice ass, but I’m not really into beefcakes or American-as-apple-pie types, so I haven’t been ogling you, really.”

“Uhm. Thanks?” Steve looked somehow even more deeply confused. “But the soul-thing––”

“I’m not sure how it works. Loki isn’t, either, as far as what causes it to kick off, what mechanisms cause it to start, how they recognize compatibility or whatever––it’s a big mess of biochemistry and magic that makes my head hurt just thinking about, honestly.” He swirled his coffee a bit in his cup. “I’m, uh, glad of it, though. So is Loki, I think. It’s not gonna be easy, but I don’t think I’ll eve be bored.” He smiled a little more warmly and sincerely then, despite himself.

“Then I’m happy for you, if you really think––if this is what you want, and it makes you happy,” Steve said carefully.

Tony’s head jerked up. “Oh my god. I just realized that S.H.I.E.L.D. must have sensitivity training videos, because you’ve clearly been been forced to watch some.”

“They, uh, had someone help me with some areas of culture-shock,” the super-soldier muttered, turning red. “Sorry.”

“No, no, this is adorable, and I do appreciate it, really,” Tony said, grinning. “I’m sorry I also just find it fucking hilarious.”

“Well, you’re kind of an ass,” Steve said, in a more casual tone, smiling a bit as he relaxed somewhat. Being mocked by Tony was more familiar conversational territory.

“Well. Glad we’ve got that straightened out.” Tony sat down at the table and took the remaining bacon for himself. “Relatively speaking. So. How’s everyone else?”

“Traumatized,” Clint sighed.

“Amused,” Natasha said.

“I’ll second that,” Bruce added.

“Exasperated,” was Steve’s input.

“That too,” Bruce agreed.

After a few bites, Tony nodded and concluded, “Sounds about right.”

 

~~

 

A few nights later, Loki returned from his ventures off to complete mysterious errands. He came back with a sample of Uru metal fresh from Dvergarheim, video footage on his recently-acquired StarkPhone of Amora and Skurge being tricked into starting a conflict in no-man’s land on a planet the Skrulls and Kree were fighting over, and an air of mild smugness.

Tony promptly made it his mission to do unseemly things to Loki until that smugness fell apart along with all the rest of the trickster’s composure. The mission was a great success, and fun all around, but after it was closeness and a strangely comfortable hush as they re-attuned to one another being near, and being calm.

“Your kick-off of Thanos-related vengeance plans working out then?” Tony asked, after the silence had gone on for nearly a quarter of an hour. His voice was low, and did not disturb the quiet overmuch.

“Yes. Your Avengers?”

“They’re informed.” Sprawled over Loki as he was, he settled his arm under his chin to lift his head a bit, both resting on the trickster’s chest. “And I’ve been thinking about the life-span thing.”

“Oh?”

“Relax,” the inventor assured, smiling a little. “You know I’m tied to this place, same as you were to Asgard for so long.”

The trickster nodded.

“It’ll be a long while before I’m comfortable leaving them all to their own devices, without me, but I still see that happening, with time.” His free hand traced along Loki’s ribs as he spoke. “Until then, I’ll be mostly here. So, you know, 80% earth-bound for at least a few decades. What about you?”

Loki hummed. “I’ve considered.”

“Tell me, then.”

His arms, where they had settled about Tony’s waist earlier, tugged him up a bit closer. “I’m curious about the world that managed to produce you. I’m curious about most everything to do with you, in fact. I could while away some time, here, particularly spent with you and your questions.”

“I have a lot of those.”

“As do I.”

“Well, then. Let’s see how it goes from here.”

“Yes.” Loki pulled him into a kiss, brief and warm and close. “Let’s.”


End file.
